pretty easy to assign blame and guilt when they make it an easy choice.
The New York Times's description of Michael Brown as "no angel" has prompted a swift, critical reaction from other media outlets, including Vox, and various people on social media.
Alison Mitchell, national editor for the Times, defended the term in conversations with the Washington Post's Erik Wemple:
"It comes out of the opening scene," says Mitchell, who notes that "like many teenagers," Brown was indeed "no angel." Okay, but would the New York Times have chosen this term — which is commonly used to describe miscreants and thugs — if the victim had been white? Mitchell: "I think, actually, we have a nuanced story about the young man and if it had been a white young man in the same exact situation, if that’s where our reporting took us, we would have written it in the same way." When asked whether she thought that "no angel" was a loaded term in this context, Mitchell said she didn't believe it was. "The story ... talks about both problems and promise," she notes.
The Times's response has done little to calm the storm. Sean McElwee, research assistant at Demos, dug into the archives to compare the Times's description of Brown to the newspaper's previous descriptions of serial killers and terrorists. Of course, comparing articles produced decades apart by different writers and editors isn't an exact science. But it does lend context to the widespread frustration over how young black men are portrayed in the media.
what's going on, this looks like the power structure trying to defuse the rightful concerns by those who seem to be prey of political parties, police dept., law enforcement period, the legal system, some churches that claim they are Christian driven entities, and the media, the really egregious thing is this is not new, this is an centuries old endeavor by those who do because they can.
there are some examples of the way media handles the race problem especially when there is a legal issue. remember O J and others when media like Time mag and others posted pictures that are deliberately darkened to impose a more menacing figure, hey it sells more product but it also promotes more fear and misleading rhetoric to prevail
, we seem to get tried in the media before a trial, guilty before proven guilty seems to be the protocol of defendants of color, i'm not saying who is or isn't guilty but what you see and hear certainly are.
there never seems to be any concern that they could be misleading and potentially tainting the jury pool innocents' takes a back seat to bottom line sales revenue.
